A Summer School in the heart of digital and Humanities

Due to their rich and varied content, court records are the funds that are by far the most operated by researchers in Humanities and Social Sciences. Integrating data from these funds in a single database allows their content to be described and exploited.

However, these contents are often very heterogeneous. There are dates, names of people, functions (legal, administrative, political), places (domicile of people and institutions), objects (maps, plans, seals etc.). The sum of the contents must involve a discipline-specific analysis in Humanities and Social Sciences (economic, legal historical analysis,prosopography, geographical etc.).

Thus, the team designing a database from these heterogeneous elements is often hampered in the search for a suitable pattern and the development of a website to make it accessible.

If one looks at the archives of the European Court earlier in the nineteenth century, beyond heterogeneity one may be struck by a certain consistency of data. For example, the comparison of the archives of the Imperial Chamber (conserved in Koblenz, Liege and Wetzlar) with those of the Great Council of Malines, the sacred royal Council of Naples, the Court of Sweden or parliaments of France, reveals striking similarities. From these similarities, a common European database model could emerge.

Without going into the specificities of each discipline of Humanities and Social Sciences, the summer school intends to sensitize participants to issues raised and provide open source solutions.

To do this, a workshop course should allow the participants to be confronted with problems (simulation, data granularity, the relationship between data), address them and develop solutions to provide interoperability and data continuity.